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Why Search Engine Optimization Isn’t Enough! Legitimate Link Building After the Nofollow Tag. PART 1 January 19, 2010

Posted by admin in : Sem , comments closed

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With all of the SEO companies popping up everywhere how do you know your SEO efforts are going to pay off? I spend a significant amount of time reviewing SEO offerings from other companies and find that the range in quality of SEO can vary greatly. While doing proper SEO is very important, will SEO alone dramatically improve your ranking in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP)? If you don’t have an effective Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaign, the answer is probably not! SEM uses several techniques that could include but aren’t limited to, SEO, Link Building, Pay Per Click, Social Media and more. The focus of this article, and one of the more difficult and time consuming aspects of a good SEM campaign, is link building.

What is link building and why is it important?

Link building is the process of building your sites link popularity, or simply put, creating links back to your site from other sites. This is very important and arguably the most heavily weighed factor in determining your site ranking in the SERPs. Through building a large amount of outside links back to your site, the Search Engines will view you as more relevant, credible (possibly), and popular. Ideally you should try and build links from credible websites with content related to you site. The more popular and credible the linking website the more it should help you. There are all sort of potential ramifications for building links from unsavory websites and link exchange services which are beyond the scope of this article. But suffice it to say you can actually be doing more damage than good if you try and take shortcuts. Remember if something sounds too good to be true, it usually is… and it’s been my experience that this adage holds truer today, on the internet, than at any point in history! (Thanks Nigeria!)

Why link building today is harder than ever.

After many years of link building abuse from comment spammers and the like, Google came up with an answer, the nofollow tag. Because of rampant misuse of people posting spam comments on blogs, bulletin boards, and content sites, the nofollow tag was introduced. This is a method by which sites could still allow users to post links, without lending any of their sites credibility to the referring link. In other words, your site now gets NO credit for linking if the referring site uses the nofollow tag. It seems major sites, that were once a staple of link building (both credible and otherwise) are all going the way of the nofollow tag. Wikipedia, craigslist, yahoo answers, and the list goes on. While I am not sad to see spammers lives made more difficult, this has made credible link building more difficult for the rest of us. Below are 5 ideas for good and credible link building after the nofollow tag.

1. Article Syndication – Writing relevant articles with good content, that will interest readers is always a great idea for more than just link building. It helps establish your reputation as a professional and build credibility. It is also very time consuming but over the long run well worth it. As part of your link building campaign consider writing 2 to 3 articles a week and syndicating those to 10 – 20 different article syndication sites. Part 2 of this article will include syndication sites listed by popularity and that will be a great place to start! It may take you an extra 5 or 10 hours a week, but your efforts will pay off big time over time. If you don’t have the time, consider hiring someone who will work with you to develop link building plan and submit your articles for you. There are many good companies out there that can help you with this.

2. Press Releases – Have you recently launched your business or a new website, product or anything else worth telling the world about? Consider issuing a press release. While most of these services are not free they are a very effective means to get the word out about your company and create links from highly trusted websites. PR Newswire offers a large variety of services that can reach many different audiences. It’s not free but it is effective.

3. Social Bookmarking – Social bookmarking sites are a great way to promote your content. Part 2 of this article will include a current list of social bookmarking sites that do not make use of the nofollow tag and more detailed strategy using social bookmarking.

4. Blogging – Blogging is a great way to add content to your site, gain a following of readership, gain relevancy and credibility with the search engines and your prospects and clients. Blogging can also be a great way to link build. Once you have established your blog and have a decent following, you can make use of guest bloggers from other popular blogs, or even link to another popular blog when you see a post that you think is excellent and your readers would appreciate. There is a reasonable chance the owner will notice your inbound link and link back, if you have good and relevant content. Warning: if you do plan to blog, make sure you stay on top of it and post content frequently. Weekly if not daily is preferred, but even more important than frequency of posting, post GOOD CONTENT.

5. Trade Links (if it’s relevant and beneficial) – Email the webmasters of sites that compliment your site but generally do not compete with it, the more popular the better. Outline the benefits for them to link to your site. Explain how their readers could benefit from the content on your site and how your readers benefit from the content on theirs! ALWAYS HAVE A LINK TO their site on your site already BEFORE you do this. Include the location of this link on your site in the email and explain why your visitors benefit from linking to them. This can be a very effective tool when done right because you are building links from highly popular and highly relevant sites to yours. Part 2 to this article will discuss strategy to trade links in much more detail.

For more tips or information on how T2T Marketing can help you market your business online successfully, call us at 858-952-0848 or visit our website at for help with your SEM or SEO Campaign.

Great SEO Tips That Work January 19, 2010

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When it comes to Search Engine Optimization also known as SEO almost all website technicians have heard of it and wish that they could do it as well. Well guess what, SEO is possible to do to your website, you just have to keep in mind that SEO isn’t all the website is made up of. You will also have to keep up with the website in general and not focus too much on the SEO where the web page gets outdated.

First you have to focus on the keywords. A keyword is the word that you will be using a lot in the Web page text. In 250 word texts on your web page use the keyword about 5-15%, You may think that there is no such thing as using a keyword in your web page text too many times, but the truth is that you can. Using the keyword in your web page text too many time can create the negative effect from what you are wanting. You may discourage people away from your web page and they may not be able to find it if you use that keyword too many times.

When it comes to great SEO tips that work something else to concentrate on is maybe to find someone who will compose the SEO text for your website for you, you could pay a friend or family member a little bit of extra money to write the SEO text for you, make sure you tell them exactly what you want and what you are looking for and if the first time they mess up, or perhaps even the second time isn’t quit what you want, don’t discourage them away from it because at least you have the base of some type of SEO script to go by. Nothing will be the way you want it unless you do it, so of course there will be a bit of editing to do to an SEO if you have someone else do it.

All About Google PageRank January 19, 2010

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PageRank (PR) is Google’s way of measuring the quality and relative “importance” of your website to searchers. It’s purpose is to give web surfers an idea of the importance of a website.

PageRank is measured on a scale of 0 to 10. Your PageRank depends on the amount of web pages that link to yours, and the PR’s of each of those pages.

It can take up to three months for a new website to be assigned a PageRank – depending on when Google decides to do the Google Update, where all websites’ PR’s are reviewed.

A thousand links from pages with low PageRanks can eventually achieve as high a PR as that from a few web pages with high PR’s. Some website owners research the value of a potential link partner’s PR before deciding whether or not to link with them.

It’s true that a web page with a high PageRank can pass on a high PR to you, but this can be offset if the page has too many links on it, because the PR is distributed proportionally to all the web pages it links to.

A page with a low PR may be worth linking to.

The website may be very new and you will have to wait for the Google Update before the value of linking with that website can be determined.

Never link with a website merely because they have a high PR – consider the content of the website and it’s relevance to your target market as well.

Misconceptions Addressed: A High PageRank does not mean you will rank at the top of Google’s results pages; it merely means that your website is well established on the Internet and if it is listed in the Google Directory, www.directory.google.com, it will be listed above similar websites with a lower PageRank.

It is debateable, but the only true benefits of a high PageRank is that visitors that come across your site and see on the Google Toolbar that you have a high rank may perceive you as a more professional business and that you are more likely to receive more hits from the google directory.